Lou Krieger

Last time we left you making a slightly more-than-half-the-pot $12 wager and your opponent raised $200. You have a pair of queens, an overpair to the Js-10c-6d board, but realize that even if you call his $200 wager, you can expect to see bets on the turn and the river that will put your entire $700 stack at risk. What now?

The size of your stack of chips and those of your opponents can have a significant impact on how you play a hand. If you’re playing in a $1-$3 no-limit game and have $300 in front of you, but you have just one opponent who has only $35 left to wager, the effective stack size is $35. That’s all you can win from him and all he can win from you. The maximum potential leverage of a wager either of you might make is only $35.

A squeeze play is one of the simplest maneuvers to execute at the poker table. It’s easily understood, yet fraught with risk, and your success depends almost entirely on how well you are able to read your opponents. The time to squeeze is when a loose-aggressive player raises from early position, and another player calls the raise before the action gets around to you.

The squeezer now makes a large reraise, banking on the fact that no players acting after him will call and the initial raiser and the caller will both fold, allowing him to take down the pot.

To some players, poker is deadly serious business. To others, it is a gamble and a lark—just another form of casino gambling where the idea is to have lots of fun, and any money you happen to win is just icing on the cake. If you have a choice of games, you figure to do better in games where players are having a good time, are in a party mood, have lots of chips in front of them, and they’re not at all reluctant to scatter them about with any and all manner of poker hands. Compare that to a tight, hunkered-down table, where the party atmosphere looks more like a hangover, and each player seems to be clinging to their chips until they squeak.

The tilt factor is critically important to poker players, and how you deal with it can make the difference between being a lifelong winner, or a loser for life.

Most players have gone on tilt at one time or another in a poker game. Some tilt frequently, some seldom, while others claim to have a zero tilt factor—though I’m not sure that’s really true. What’s more important is a player’s ability to recognize tilt when it happens, and then do something about it.

In its first tournament since going live on April 1, the Face Up Entertainment Group hosted a tournament on April 8. The four winners and their guest will be on board Royal Caribbean Cruises’ Oasis of the Seas for a poker cruise.

The cruise will include Face-Up sponsored professional training sessions and seminars, with Tom McEvoy hosting our winners for the week of September 15 – 22 voyage that departs Fort Lauderdale Fl. and cruises the Western Caribbean.

When some people goof, they get egg on their face. When I do it, it’s an entire omelet. Last issue I reported on the winner of Harrah’s Rincon main event, but somehow substituted results from the 2011 event, instead of this year’s tournament. But we’ll get it right, even if we have to do it twice.

Although we were late in reporting these results, main event winner, Joe Kuether, was late to the dance too, arriving at the $1,600 buy-in main event during the fourth hour of play on Day One. By end of the first session, he was above average in chips, and well on his way to his biggest live tournament cash. During the seven-hour final table battle, Kuether, a graduate of the University of Wisconsin, won his first WSOP Circuit gold ring, and $111,104 in prize money.

Poker is a zero sum game. If there wasn’t any rake, the money won by players at the table would always equal what others lost. Because of that, poker doesn’t seem like a place where you’d expect to find many win-win opportunities.

The government’s planned prosecution of Utah banker John Campos hit a road block of sorts, when US District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan ordered prosecutors to explain in writing why they let former Utah banker John Campos plead guilty to a misdemeanor instead of a felony, and avoid a trial scheduled for April 9. When Judge Kaplan blocked the guilty plea, he said he needed to know why the government was walking away from the case.

So much has been written about Texas hold’em strategies in the past half decade or so, that the game’s state of the art has improved dramatically. It’s safe to say that a winning hold’em player who entered a time capsule in 2005 and emerged at a poker table in 2012 would have a tough time winning. Play has changed, and because of the hundreds of books on the subject, online poker learning sites, coaching and teaching availability, comparing today’s winning players against players from 2005 would be like comparing 2012 NBA players with those of 40 years ago.